Generation of Computer Programming Languages

Computer Programming

Computer programming is the process of executing some automated tasks repeatedly. Tasks depend on the program instruction and other components given by a computer programmer. To make a programmable device, structured instruction is required for functioning and running the device. From these requirements, the concepts of programming language developed. Instructions for functioning a computer device is written using a programming language is called writing source code.

Modern computer programming has been developed advanced concept and applications that made programming procedure more easy and productive. Testing, debugging, algorithms from sketch, etc very common terms in modern programming. But the early stage of computing was not so much developed. And with the development of computing programming language also has been updated.

Almost every higher college and university is teaching programming to computer science students and also researching the computation to develop the area of computing.

Programming Language

Since the development of programming language, many changes, updates have occurred. Based on programs difficulty level, programming languages can be categorized as follows;

Language Generations

To understand the types and categories, programming language also can be divided into generations. Since the development of programming language, all the languages can be categorized into a total of 5 generations:

1st Generation Language (1GL) – also known as the machine language used to program the 1st generation computer and system development like interface, modem, hardware, CPU programming, all the low level embedded program, etc. Machine language is also called low-level programming language because it is very hard to understand fix by a human but easily understood by computers.

2nd Generation Language(2GL) – also known as assembly language. It is the upgrade version of machine language. Source codes are written in assembly language easier to understand compared to machine language. Before executing assembly code on a device an assembler is required because of computers only understand the machine code. But based on difficulty, assembly language also considered as the low-level programming language.

3rd Generation Language(3GL) – considered as modern and high-level language. Most of the programmers use high-level programming languages in the software development field. Languages like C, C++, Java, Fortran, etc are considered as high-level programming languages.

4th Generation Language(4GL) – is the upgrade version of 3rd generation programming language and also considered as the high-level programming languages. Most of the modern scripting languages are considered as 4th generation high-level language (e,g: PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, etc)

5th Generation Language(5GL) – basically have visual functionality to develop programs. Languages like Mercury, OPS5, or Prolog considered as the 5th generation programming language. It is also considered as the very high-level programming language.

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